Technology

The 1980s show Knight Rider was about a guy who drove a talking car and solved crimes. I think. I (sort of) remember watching a young(ish) David Hasselhoff argue with the car, a 1982 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am named KITT (Knight Industries Two Thousand), voiced by William Daniels. KITT had a Cylon-like red light on its (his?) front grill which made the car seem vaguely menacing. Knight Rider was amazing ‘80s television and as such, had an equally spectacular theme song (sidebar: I would like us to get back to TV theme songs that explain the entire plot of the show either in the lyrics or via a voiceover like this one did. I miss you, 1980s). London-based cellist Samara Ginsberg, who among other things, produces “virtuoso arrangements of cartoon/film/tv/video game themes” took the Knight Rid...

A new tool by hacking group Unc0ver can jailbreak iOS 13.5, the just-released version of Apple’s mobile operating system, Wired reported. The group says the jailbreak, which works on iOS 11 and higher, is built on a zero-day vulnerability, doesn’t drain a device’s battery life, and doesn’t affect the use of Apple services or undermine the iOS sandbox security, according to Wired. Unc0ver’s lead developer told Wired the jailbreak adds exceptions to existing rules, and “enables reading new jailbreak files and parts of the filesystem that contain no user data.” The jailbreak tool is not open source, and the group didn’t say which vulnerability in iOS it exploited to build the tool. Jailbreaking gives a user more control over a device’s OS, allowing customization and the installation of apps t...

An analysis of the latest update to Google Messages suggests it may be moving closer to having end-to-end encryption for RCS, according to 9to5 Google (via APKMirror). Rich communication services, or RCS, is the successor to SMS messaging and does what most other texting services do, but without the end-to-end encryption that apps like Signal and iMessage have. Its widespread adoption has been a bit of a mess, but the major US cellular carriers announced late last year that they would offer RCS in 2020. Google first unveiled RCS chat as Android’s primary texting platform in 2018, and in November, announced it was actually rolling it out to users in the US. An internal build of Google Messages v. 6.2 has several lines of code that offer clues to possible future features for the app, includi...

President Trump wants to create a panel that would look into complaints of bias against conservatives on social media and other online platforms, The Wall Street Journal reported. What authority the panel would have, and under what department it would be based were not clear. But the Journal’s sources said the plans may include establishing a “White House-created commission” that would work in conjunction with agencies like the Federal Elections Commission and Federal Communications Commission to examine bias and censorship online. A White House official told the WSJ that “left wing bias in the tech world is a concern that definitely needs to be addressed.” The president tweeted a similar opinion last week, that “The Radical Left is in total command & control of Facebook, Instagram, Tw...

Twitter is testing a new feature that lets users decide who can reply to their tweets, the company announced on Wednesday, and some accounts are already using it in some interesting new ways. Previously, anybody could reply to anybody on Twitter (as long as their profile wasn’t private or blocked). But now, if you’re part of the test, you can decide if you want to allow replies from everyone, only people you follow, or only people you tag — which, if you don’t tag anyone, means that no one can reply at all. Deciding who can reply to which tweet on a tweet-by-tweet basis could change how some people use the social media platform in significant ways. Interviews on Twitter, for example, could be much more streamlined, and NBC’s Twitter account for Meet the Press has already shown an example o...

It’s Memorial Day weekend in the US. Several retailers are offering some of the best deals that we’ve seen in months, spanning several categories of tech. There’s quite a lot to look at today, so we’ve included a selection of promotions below. Now is about the time when we hear something from Amazon about when its annual Prime Day will happen. For what it’s worth, Amazon may be planning to delay its Prime Day shopping event, usually in July, to September. So, it’s possible that some of these deals might not come back for a few months. Then again, since we’ve seen many of these discounts below making repeat appearances, some of them may be here to stay. Headphones Computing The Acer Swift 5 laptop is one of the products you can save big on this weekend.Photo by Avery White for The Verge Ace...

After resisting pressure from the US for months, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is apparently preparing to phase out the use of Huawei equipment from the UK’s 5G networks, the Financial Times reported. Citing national security concerns, members of the UK’s Tory party have pushed for Huawei technology to be removed from the UK’s 5G infrastructure and the rest of its telecom network by 2023. The Trump administration has banned government use of Huawei’s technology, and the president signed an executive order last May blocking US companies from buying foreign-made telecommunications equipment that may pose national security risks. The order doesn’t single out any one company, but is viewed as a way to exclude Chinese firms like ZTE and Huawei from doing business in the US. Last week, Trump exte...

After two days of intense reviews, NASA is giving its commercial partner SpaceX the thumbs-up to launch its first astronauts to space next week. There’s still more work to be done by both the agency and SpaceX, including another review on Monday, but officials decided there were no major issues standing in the way of the launch. “It was a good review, great discussion,” NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said during a press conference. “I think everybody in the room was very clear that now’s the time to speak up if there are any challenges.” Bridenstine noted that many people did speak up, and they had a lot of discussions about various aspects of the mission. “At the end we got to a ‘go,’” he said. “So we are now preparing for a launch in five short days.” On May 27th, SpaceX is slated to...

Glitch laid off “a substantial number of employees” on Thursday in an effort to cut costs and ensure “long term viability,” the company confirmed in an email to The Verge. Glitch said it had to “significantly cut operating costs” due to market conditions. At least 18 people were laid off, according to two former employees who asked to remain anonymous. Glitch had about 50 employees before the layoffs, the sources said. Glitch declined to comment on how many employees were laid off. The company said it is offering “severance, health insurance, and support in finding new employment” to employees who were laid off. Glitch CEO Anil Dash tweeted that the layoffs came as a result of being a “small company in a fiercely competitive space in a tough economy.” We had layoffs at Glitch this week. Th...

Seven months after he filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy to deal with $3.6 billion in personal debt, the reorganization plan laid out by Jia Yueting — the tycoon founder of troubled EV startup Faraday Future — has been approved by a judge. In overly simple terms, the majority of the many people and companies he owes money — largely thanks to the collapse of LeEco, the overly-leveraged tech conglomerate he built his fortune with in China — have agreed to swap their debt claims for pieces of Jia’s ownership stake in Faraday Future. They now only have a shot of being made whole if and when the struggling startup successfully completes a public listing on a major stock exchange. Founded in 2014, Faraday Future has spent more than $1.7 billion (around $900 million of which was Jia’s) on its own an...

Here’s something that can be easy to forget about comic book superheroes, given how popular they’ve become over the last decade: they’re really quite old. This is especially true for DC Comics characters like Batman and Superman, who were created in the 1930s. Comic books were extremely different then, and many superheroes of the Golden Age were specific to their era in ways that don’t necessarily translate to modern success outside of the odd period piece. Stargirl is a modern love letter to those old superheroes, but it never really sells you on why you should love them. Stargirl — which you can watch Mondays on DC Universe or a slightly edited for broadcasting on the CW on Tuesdays — begins 10 years before the present day in the middle of the final battle between the Justice Society of ...

They’re pulling the plug on the New York Auto Show. The show, which is typically held in April and draws over 1 million attendants, was delayed until August due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But organizers are now saying they won’t be able to meet that deadline and are focused on reviving the auto show in spring 2021. The Javits Center, which houses the auto show, is still being used as a field hospital The Javits Center, which houses the auto show, is still being used as a field hospital for patients with COVID-19. Currently there are no patients being treated there, though the convention remains in “standby mode” in case of future emergency. New York City was particularly hard hit by the virus, with over 196,000 confirmed cases and 16,000 deaths. “Since the beginning of this pandemic, we hav...